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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by Daishiman on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @12:35PM (#48372553)
A metric was introduced. A metric was maximized. The metric stopped being a proxy for anything. A new metric is to be introduced and likewise gamed.
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by ChrisArchitect on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @12:43PM (#48372687)
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315583
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by llbbdd on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:26PM (#48373274)
Kind of surprising. I had interpreted these tokenmaxxing initiatives at some of the larger companies as R&D investment, motivating employees to find the useful applications of a new technology with fairly broad applicability. Obviously some people gamed it, but I wonder if everyone gamed it or if opening the floodgates made for any useful discoveries.
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by Ancalagon on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:50PM (#48373650)
If any useful optimizations were discovered I imagine they belonged to people at the bottom of the leaderboards and hence weren't noticed by tokenmaxxing chad execs too dumb to have an ounce of creative thinking.
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by rescbr on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:52PM (#48373666)
Day 2 Amazon only cares about the KPI.

Innovation does not grow out of KPIs.

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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by Henchman21 on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @04:19PM (#48375689)
No but often earnings do
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by belval on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @04:56PM (#48376170)
You still have near-infinite tokens, you just don't get awards for using a lot.
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by jmchuster on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:50PM (#48373646)
I guess that tokenmaxxing phase has served its purpose, of forcing people's brains to go from "i will never use AI, it's scary and new and useless" to "i must learn to use it, this is the new normal, otherwise i'm getting fired".

And now they're able to move to the phase of "let's now learn to actually use it effectively".

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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by bigfatkitten on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @04:14PM (#48375604)
I am in the “I will use AI where it makes sense to make my job easier” camp. This approach was unfortunately incompatible with my SVP’s “we need to 10x AI” goal.

I found ChatGPT to be a never ending source of ideas for how to light tokens on fire as fast as possible in order to hit my target.

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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by RattlesnakeJake on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @01:56PM (#48373717)
> What happened next was predictable in hindsight. Employees began inflating their scores through tokenmaxxing: running meaningless tasks through AI agents to consume tokens and climb the rankings.

That was predictable in foresight.

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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by hereticles on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @02:22PM (#48374131)
It's a classic example of giving people the wrong incentive
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by sgarland on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @05:59PM (#48376914)
Right? Make any metric meaningful for an employee, and they will find ways to maximize that metric. I thought this was a well-understand phenomenon.
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Re:Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees by HellDunkel on Tuesday June 02, 2026 @02:00PM (#48373810)
"normalised deployments," sounds even worse than tokenmaxxing
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